DNA on the raincoat: The final clue regarding Celine Cremer’s whereabouts – Revealing the truth behind the DNA results announced just moments ago.
Nearly eight months after searchers uncovered a glass water bottle and a cut-up plastic bag beside a fallen tree in north-west Tasmania, a coroner has concluded those objects may have had nothing to do with missing Belgian tourist Celine Cremer.
Cremer, 31, set out on 17 June 2023 for what was meant to be a short walk to Philosopher Falls, near Waratah. Her car was later found in the trailhead car park with camping equipment still inside, indicating she had not planned an overnight stay. She never returned. Tasmania Police searched the track and the Arthur River for about ten days before calling off the official operation.
Her family then hired private investigators. In December 2025 a volunteer team found her phone. Days later they located a Mt Ossa glass bottle and plastic bags with holes cut in them, arranged near a log as if someone had tried to improvise a poncho and take shelter. The items sat only a few hundred metres from the phone. For months they were treated as possible proof that Cremer had stopped, cold and lost, on her first night in the bush.
Coroner Madeleine Wilson’s findings, released on 28 August 2026, dismantle that narrative. Cremer’s DNA was not detected on the bottle. Testing instead returned male DNA. The bags also carried male DNA; results for female DNA were inconclusive. Wilson said she was not satisfied the objects showed Cremer had sheltered at that spot in June 2023.
The coroner did confirm the remains recovered along the Arthur River in January and February 2026 belonged to Cremer, and ruled out the involvement of any other person. She died by accident between 17 and 21 June 2023. The chain of events, Wilson found, began after Cremer visited the Philosopher Falls lookout and took the poorly defined track toward Magnet Dam instead of walking straight back to the car park. It was late afternoon, four days before the winter solstice, and light was fading. She wandered off the path, dropped her phone, became disoriented and moved toward the river. How she entered the water cannot be established. She may have slipped from the bank or attempted a crossing.
Overnight temperatures were near freezing. Cremer was not wearing waterproof clothing and had not followed standard wilderness precautions: carrying a map and torch, dressing for wet weather, walking within her limits, avoiding solo travel, and telling someone her plan.
Wilson judged the original police search adequate given the high river levels of 2023, which were far above those present when the remains were found. She commended the later private search, led by IFW Global and volunteers including Cremer’s friends, and recommended Tasmania Police formalise protocols for working with such groups. The local council has since marked the track and posted a closure warning; the coroner asked for clearer signage at the start of the walk.
The bottle and bag had seemed to close a painful gap in the story. Forensic testing reopened it. Cremer’s last hours remain those of a walker who took a wrong turning at dusk, lost her only navigation tool, and never found the way back.
